Talk:Victorian dress reform

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Great stuff, Zora. I made some links; more anon.

I can add the Wiggan pit girls' clothes (I have references, need to dig them up) under working women's clothes. PKM 03:19, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

1 NPOV
- 1.1 Anti-dress-reform quote
2 Problems
3 bicycling illustration caption
4 Image 1889
5 Girls dress

[edit] NPOV

The Victorian dress reform was a bad concept.

This book is against the dress reform (in CHAPTER IX. CORSETS.) http://haabet.dk/patent/How_to_be_beautiful/index.html

This book is against both the dress reform and the Victorian dress. And this book is for a shoulder dress http://haabet.dk/patent/Die_kultur_des_weiblichen_korpers_als_grundlage_der_frauenkleidung/ Håbet 20:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Haabet, I really have very little idea what you mean to be saying. If you mean that people ridiculed Bloomers and "artistic dress", then you're not saying anything new. If you mean that you prefer Victorian attire to 20th-century clothing, then that doesn't belong in the article. The "weight suspended from the shoulders instead of from the waist" debate was an issue in the late 19th century or Edwardian era, and could be mentioned in the article, but the fact that nobody has said anything about it yet is not "NPOV". Otherwise, I don't know what meaning you're trying to convey, and I'm not going to sift through whole long texts in order to make a guess. Churchh 10:41, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

P.S. Here's an Oscar Wilde quote in the Pall Mall Gazette, October 14th 1884, replying to a woman who wrote a letter stating objections to dress reform:

She makes two points: that high heels are a necessity for any lady who wishes to keep her dress clean from the Stygian mud of our streets, and that without a tight corset "the ordinary number of petticoats and etceteras" cannot be properly or conveniently held up. Now, it is quite true that as long as the lower garments are suspended from the hips a corset is an absolute necessity; the mistake lies in not suspending all apparel from the shoulders. In the latter case a corset becomes useless, the body is left free and unconfined for respiration and motion, there is more health, and consequently more beauty. Indeed all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called "dress improver" [bustle] also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, the error of not seeing that it is from the shoulders, and from the shoulders only, that all garments should be hung.

[edit] Anti-dress-reform quote

EVERY little while some writer, some "dress reformer," some one wishing to advance a theory of her own, opens up a tirade against corsets. They are generally represented by these "agitators" as a death dealing instrument of torture. If these people have personally found them injurious, they have made them so. Presumably, if the inventor of the much-abused corset had for one moment thought it necessary to furnish brains in the shape of written directions as to the use of his popular invention he would gladly have done so, or have made the attempt to get a bill passed prohibiting women from committing suicide by the aid of an invention intended only for comfort, grace and beauty. This unending war against corsets that has been raging for about two score years and ten is certainly as good an advertisement as the most enterprising manufacturers can wish for. It proves conclusively that the corset wins all of the battles. If, in the fight, it has even wiped off from the face of the earth a few brainless women it is difficult to understand why the corset should be held responsible. If a woman's vanity, poor taste or ignorance leads her to "draw the strings" until a serious injury is the result, she should by all means discard the corset, just as she would flee from any other temptation she has not the will power to resist. The evil, however, should not be laid to the corset.

So much has been said and written upon the subject that, as we hear the word, a vision of a compressed waist floats through the mind, and yet one never heard a strong, healthy, well-developed, woman acknowledge that she could get along without one. Some kind of a support is positively necessary. The most enthusiastic reformer always has a substitute, not differing materially excepting in name. I know a slender, thin woman that insists upon parading the fact that she never wears the "horrible things." Her underwaists are corded and whaleboned, her dress waists are padded to fill out the hollows, and each seam whaleboned. In addition her waists are fitted so snugly that it seems marvelous the buttons do not fly to the four corners of the earth. Yet, this woman considers because she does not wear a corset she is not imjuring herself. There is nothing more com fortable than a well-fitting corset. -- User:Haabet 21:17, 19 April 2006

That's nice -- some people defended the corset. However, considering that women went many thousands of years not wearing anything like a corset, and that 20th century fashion has rather decisively rejected it, it seems like it's not in fact true that "the corset wins all of the battles"[sic], or that "Victorian dress reform was a bad concept"[sic] (so that denying these assertions is not "NPOV"). And putting all the blame onto individual women for tight-lacing ignores the fact that the images of contemporary attractiveness that a Victorian woman would have seen all around her were mostly depictions of highly-corseted women[1] -- just as putting all the blame onto an individual woman today for anorexia would ignore the fact that the images of contemporary attractiveness that a woman sees all around her are mostly of very thin women. The first case of anorexia I ever heard about (maybe the first one that got wide media coverage) was of somebody who was obsessed with looking just like Twiggy.

So this "tightlacing Darwinism" in your quote above seems rather nasty and vicious to me -- a misogynistic blaming of the fashion victim. If you want to say that there were conservative defenders of the corset, then that would be a reasonable addition to the article (but don't try to add it yourself, since your English-language skills are not really up to par). But if you want to say that they were correct, or quote from them at great length, then that WOULDN'T belong in the article.

If you're interested in contemporary quotes, try these: http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/PageView/91023/0008?id=d6bdd073d6 http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/PageView/91023/0013?id=d6bdd073d6 etc. Churchh 17:15, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problems

The dress reform was rarity
The importance of dress reform is exaggerated in the history
The one dress reform by great success, was the straight front corset. But this is not mentioned in the article.
the Triumph of the natural silhouette was about 1924-28!

Håbet 01:07, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Haabet, women who were willing to take bold dramatic steps to go outside the conventional norms were a rarity -- but the constrictingness of corsets and the cumbersomness of heavy full skirts was something that most middle- and upper-class women felt at one time or another in their lives, and a small but significant number of women thought that it was a very major problem. Not much practical real-world "dress reform" was attained until the mid-1910s, but the desire or demand for it was a significant undercurrent of opinion from the 1850s on. If a pamphlet was printed in 1894 by a respected organization saying "Women need no other one thing so much as freedom of dress" (see Canadiana.org links above), then that's worthy of note.

I know you're very preoccupied with the Gaches-Sarraute thing, but though the change from the Victorian corset to the Edwardian "S-bend" corset may have originally been intended as a dress reform, there's ample evidence that the manner in which the S-bend corset was adopted into high fashion wasn't much of a true dress reform at all... Churchh 14:14, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] bicycling illustration caption

I think this needs some work. The change I made yesterday has been altered, and I don't think it makes sense, grammatically or in general to the lay reader. It now says:

An 1897 ad, showing a relatively early example of an ordinary non-sea-bathing in public view in unskirted garments (to ride a bicycle).

I suggest that more background info be inserted into the text. I don't have the particular knowledge myself, but perhaps along these lines:

By (date), women in (countries) would commonly wear unskirted garments such as the (wotsit) to bathe in the sea (see link to other page about sea-bathing or whatever). This was still the only setting in which unskirted garments were socially acceptable. The advent of the safety bicycle proved a massive leap forward for women; American suffragist Susan B. Anthony called it a "freedom machine". It gave women personal mobility and a greater need for rational dress. (See Bicycle section on female emancipation.) Shorter skirts and cycling bloomers were the way forward.

Then the caption can become briefer.

An 1897 ad for an embrocation depicting women cycling, wearing (???).

I think that captions should describe, and the main text explain, as a general principle. BrainyBabe 06:03, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

That seems to be me to be good solution. Let's see what Churchh says before we do anything, however. The editors in the clothing and costume articles generally get along, and I hope we can keep it that way! Zora 06:19, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll leave the details to you friendly clothing editors, as I don't have the specialist knowledge. I have made some substantial alterations to bicycle and history of the bicycle about its effect on female emancipation (and thus found my way to rational dress), and would be pleased to have your comments. BrainyBabe 06:49, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

If someone is going to actually write the section (instead of it consisting solely of two images and their captions, as it does now), then all kinds of information could be added, but with the section being as it is now, the phrase "ordinary non-sea-bathing woman in public view in unskirted garments" provides essential context to understanding what it is that the image depicts, and why it's relevant to this page. An ordinary pre-1880's woman wouldn't have been caught dead in public in an unskirted garment in any context (though certain kinds of paid professional performers -- hopelessly non-"genteel" socially, of course -- wore tights in some cases). Churchh 22:06, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I can see what you mean, but I think the fact that the two women ARE cycling (as opposed to, are NOT swimming) is of vital importance in understanding why their garments were considered appropriate. Bicycles (as I try to show in that article) played a significant role in liberating C19 women. Or maybe it is just that non-sea-bathing strikes my ear as ugly. How would it be if I, an averred non-specialist, wrote a few sentences along the lines described above, and then the ilustrations gain their context from the text in which they are embedded? My research would be paltry googling, compared to the wealth of material I feel sure you have to draw on, but I am willing, if you will put up with my efforts. BrainyBabe 17:35, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm actually by no means a god-like expert in the area of 1880s-1890s fashions (you can judge my level of neutral scholarly impartiality from http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pembfun/victcfsh.html ), but I can tell that one of the "women" (the one eating dust) is actually a man... ;-)

It would be nice if the section got written, but I see no need to expand it just to avoid the alleged awkwardness of the appropriately specific descriptive phrase "ordinary non-sea-bathing woman in public view in unskirted garments". Churchh 19:55, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

P.S. The skirts of women's seabathing garments were always much shorter than the skirts of their ordinary clothes, from the time that women's public swimwear first really came into existence (ca. the 1850s), but I don't know what year skirtless swimear actually came in (it may have been after 1897). The reference to "non-sea-bathing" in the image caption was meant to refer to the fact that for many years, swimwear had been a special domain free from some of the ordinary strictures (the Victorian equivalent of Bikinis), but that the 1897 "bicycle suit" was separate from that. Churchh 20:10, 31 May 2006 (UTC)